Nerding Day: Primal Rage: The Avatars (Patreon)

There’s nothing better than a novelized sequel to a video game that never made sense to begin with. Come with me on a journey into the book I would’ve written when I was ten years old if you gave me three hours and a pencil I could drive into my brain like the Joker did to that one guy in The Dark Knight and we were all blown away because who even does that?

Remember Primal Rage? If you’re wondering where the time went in your life because everything seems a little less bright now and tastes a little less good, you probably do! It was the dinosaur fighting game like Mortal Kombat that made you go, “Hey! It’s a dinosaur fighting game like Mortal Kombat!” There were only seven fighters, which was low by even 1994 standards. There’s the fire tyrannosaur, Diablo. The regular tyrannosaur, Sauron. The cold gorilla, Blizzard. The gross gorilla, Chaos. Yes, we’ve got two palette swaps in this game, because there are only a handful of species of dinosaur. Hell, they had to make up a viper dinosaur for Vertigo, the only “woman” in the game. She does bad magic stuff! We don’t like her! Boo, girls!

We were smart enough to know Primal Rage wasn’t any good, but dumb enough to overlook it because claymation dinosaurs and gorillas hitting each other is pretty, pretty cool. If there’s one thing that everyone took from Primal Rage, it was those claymation dinosaurs and gorillas. It certainly wasn’t the holding down buttons and doing joystick motions in what might’ve been the worst gameplay decision since underwater levels were invented. Imagine doing Street Fighter 2 moves in reverse and you’re not even there on how bad this game played. Apparently there were fatalities, too, but nobody knew how to do them. You could be holding a strategy guide and still not know how to do them and also not know that, at ten years old, you should be exercising and drinking water to not end up as someone who writes for nerd ass comedy websites.

While Primal Rage was ported to a whole bunch of systems, it wasn’t quite successful enough to warrant a sequel. Well, that’s not quite true. They made a sequel and then shelved it. Do you know how hard it is to get a video game company to shelve a nearly-finished sequel to literally anything? You could shit on a PlayStation 5 disc and they’d release it, although you’d probably need to do a digital version of that as well because a lot of them don’t have Blu-ray drives now. Anyway, there was a Primal Rage II (or Rage II if you briefly glance at a wiki to pretend you did research). It just never came out.

However, apparently the story was so absolutely good that Atari needed to make its vision known to the world. And so the novel Primal Rage: The Avatars was born. Written by Jon Vornholt of Jon Vornholt fame. His Wikipedia page says he also wrote for the Super Mario Bros. 3 cartoon, so he gets a pass in my book! He also wrote, like, dozens of Star Trek books, so I bet he’s a real fucking dork whose ass I could kick. And if you’re Jon Vornholt reading this, I’m sorry. As a writer, I know being criticized by strangers is frustrating and often unfair. You’re a good guy, and you’re doing good work. Or you did. Are you alive? How are you? How’s your summer been? Please write back!

A little plot background. The original Primal Rage was about a cataclysm weakening the magical bonds that locked away the gods, e.g. dinosaurs and giant gorillas. Don’t think too hard about the evolutionary paths and timeline on these creatures because it won’t do you no good! The only part that’s deeply important to always remember is that instead of “Earth,” they call it “Urth.” They say “Urth” a lot in the book and it’s never not funny. Anyway, in the game, these dinosaurs emerged from the Urth and all the continents moved to make a sweet dinosaur head, and they fought a lot, and they had these worshippers dressed as cavemen, and, oh!, you could see these skyscrapers they used to have, and then Chaos farts and pukes everywhere and it’s so crazy, and Armadon is the good guy and he’s an ankylosaurus and they’re like knights except instead of armor, they have these bony plates and they can withstand anything, my dad told me so. That’s basically everything.

Primal Rage: The Avatars adds some new layers to this complex story. First of all, it tells the tale of how a human mage named Balsafas, which I’ve chosen to pronounce as “balls ass face,” locked the dinosaurs and gorillas away millions of years ago. Who Balsafas is and why he locked them away, or how a human exists at this point, isn’t completely clear and doesn’t really matter. What matters is the first chapter is the dinosaurs being locked away, the second chapter is the dinosaurs emerging, and then the third chapter is a thousand years later when the dinosaurs face a new threat: Necrosan, a sort of undead dinosaur dragon god who loves the old scheming, he sure does. Necrosan is connected to Balsafas in some way, but the thread is dropped pretty quickly because who cares. The other dinosaurs don’t like him because when he eats people, they escape his stomach as zombies. That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

The seven original fighters from Primal Rage are joined by Slashfang, who is a saber-toothed tiger and was also clearly cut from the game for good reason: Nobody cares about him. The book describes him as this elusive, rarely-seen God, but really, it’s a saber-toothed tiger. Those are the D-list celebrities of the prehistoric animal world. Giant gorillas are bad enough, but at least we got King Kong to play off for giant animal fun. Saber-toothed tigers? What are we, fighting in the Flintstones world? What are we, right now thinking a fighting game in the Flintstones world would be cool as hell? Anyway, we don’t see much of Slashfang, which is great. He doesn’t do anything, nor does his avatar.

Our main character is Kaze, a shaman of the gorilla Sub-Zero guy. When Necrosan locks away the other dinosaurs and gorillas and that stupid ass cat, the gods are able to transfer their powers to their individual shamans. They’re then called “avatars,” like the movie Avatar, except not that. These avatars can morph from human form into dinosaur god form for a short period of time before reverting back. Think Animorphs meets Jurassic Park and you’re way off. The avatars take these powers and fight Necrosan and also betray each other a bunch of times for no real reason and with no real effect on the story. “Betray” meaning they work with Necorsan, who threatens to kill them if they double cross him, which they do, and then triple cross, and then quadruple cross.

But here’s the good part: It’s all written like a dumb child got the chance to have their very own grown-up novel. And I do mean all of it. There is no point in the novel that sounds like an adult had a hand in crafting or editing this book. I’ve been peppering screenshots of the book throughout this column because you clapping seals need something to look at while you get your vegetables fed to you. But I want to highlight two passages that are particularly incredible. I’m not doing these as screenshots because, honestly, that would get even more confusing for me. If you want them as screenshots, get your own book! Ahhhhhh! I’m just kidding!

From the very first page of the book describing Blizzard and his army: “He heard the anxious grunts of ten thousand battle-hardened yeti troops, all of them eager yet fearful to begin the battle anew.” Again, that’s page one. That’s how we start the book. AI could never write a sentence like that. It would do a lot of sparks and ask Cosmo Spacely for help before singing “A Bicycle Built for Two.”

From a scene in which the god Chaos, who’s actually a human who did experiments on himself to become all big, when he claimed his first shaman:

“Suddenly Marty had a revelation. This creature was the epitome of hunger—the symbol for a new world with new rules! Marty was looking at his master, and he knew that if the god chose to eat him or let him live, it was all the same. This ferocious eating machine was his salvation, the future of the planet. As if in confirmation, the great beast reared back and roared so loudly that it rattled the broken glass left in the windowpanes.”

This is one of the most normal passages in the book, a farting gorilla making a guy named Marty into his shaman. It’s one of the few scenes that makes sense without a character betraying another character and then not betraying them at all. I want to emphasize this happens a whole lot, especially with Malyssa, the laziest named quasi-villain / horny sorceress who is the avatar of Vertigo. Oh, and Marty starts killing people randomly, I should’ve added that. But let’s get back to Malyssa!

Throughout the book, Malyssa does two things. One, try to betray and then un-betray Vertigo and all the other avatars. Two, constantly try to have sex with Kaze, who’s described as handsome many, many times. I wrote “try to have sex” instead of “try to fuck” because the author of this book doesn’t seem to know what actual human copulation is (thus his dozens of Star Trek novels). Malyssa apparently stays young by sleeping with and drinking the blood of male virgins. But, again, this is all talked about in the way you would’ve talked to friends at the cafeteria table in elementary school about kissing lips and touching boobs. You know it’s a thing, you’ve heard it mentioned on TV, and you know adults want it, but other than that no clue. That’s the way these avatars talk, some of which are hundreds of years old through dark magic.

I really can’t express enough how often sex and a woman’s attractiveness is brought up in this novel. It starts sexist and then veers into hilariously dumb. Malyssa’s curves and lack of clothing are brought up multiple times, each slightly more scandalized than the last. Any moment there’s a woman we do or don’t know front and center, we know what her body looks like and whether or not Kaze is attracted to her. I think the intention is to give Kaze a bit of a supernatural James Bond vibe. The ladies love him. But there’s a complete lack of sexiness in the sexuality. I was certain there would be a point where Kaze turned Malyssa down, saying, “Your top parts look good but the bottom parts are always scary on girls so I need to stay on my quest, please. When is lunch? Will there be chocolate milk?”

Nor is it just the sex talk. Literally every element of Primal Rage: The Avatars sounds like the least intelligent third grader on Earth wrote it over a weekend. That might explain why the plot doesn’t really go anywhere. Seriously, it doesn’t even follow the plot of a fighting game where characters keep going one-on-one and then there’s a victor. That would take at least a 15-year-old to write. This one, with its constant references to Chaos farting and its inconsistent references to a plot, maxes out at a twelve-year-old’s voice at best. It’s not entirely unpleasant to read, but after about two hundred pages you realize characters have been basically doing the same things over and over again. The gods whine about the good old days, two tall things punch each other to a draw, Malyssa betrays someone in exchange for sex, and Kaze kind of just exists.

There are other characters, like the velociraptor god Talon’s avatar, Keena. Keena is repeatedly referred to as a teenager, and the first half of the book sets her up as a hero who inherits the story. That makes sense. This is a video game about dinosaurs and gorillas hitting each other, so the novelization of its canceled sequel would want to spotlight a younger character. But, of course, all Keena does is act vaguely jealous of Kaze thinking Malyssa’s hot. Good news: Kaze is actually interested in a third woman, Kim, because the author really ran out of names that didn’t start with the letter K. I’m not making any of this up. Kim isn’t important, either. She’s got no powers. She just sorta yells at Kaze about not marrying her once at the beginning and we’re supposed to think they’re the greatest couple. Why yes that is how a little boy probably thinks romance works! Also, Keena being repeatedly referred to as a teenager who’s horny for an adult man is, well, disturbing to say the least and fucked up to say slightly more.

Primal Rage: The Avatars isn’t a bad novel because it’s barely a novel at all. It’s a child’s English assignment written by an adult. Without being able to play the game it’s based on, it reads like deranged fan fiction from someone whose mom keeps bringing home new uncles. It’s pure in its form. It’s the gumption of a paragraph in an old instruction manual giving minimal backstory, but stretched over 250 pages. I read the whole thing and I have nearly next to no idea why anyone was motivated to do anything other than “I be evil, she be good, we be horny.” In that way, it is perfect to me. I may not know what sex is anymore, and I may be afraid of it now, but at least I’ve just experienced the Seinfeld version of prehistoric gods. It’s a book about nothing. Nobody grows. Nobody changes. Except when they grow and change into dinosaurs. And that’s just going to have to be good enough for me.

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